“I think if we want to point the finger at something, it should be all of these lawns that we have,” Fassnacht said. Williams said lawns and developers should concern the public in regard to water use. “It comes down to education too because not everyone is a watershed scientist,” said Eric Williams, president of the Watershed Science Club at Colorado State University. “We have the expectation that we can go to the tap and turn it on and water will be there,” Laituri said.Įven using your sprinklers in the middle of the day or overusing natural resources by running your AC all of the time can have serious impacts on water resources and the ecosystems they serve. This reality means the way we interact with water may have to drastically change in order to protect it. Think of what it would mean to have ash in your drinking water or even just damaging water treatment facilities. Ash is terrible for the water treatment plants.” “You’ve got a lot of sediment that ends up in the river.

“If you burn the hillside, then you really increase the likelihood that you’re going to have rainfall causing erosion,” Fassnacht said. The larger ecological impacts Colorado has been facing, like fires and excess use of resources, have to be considered. This is particularly concerning when resources are used to manufacture snow for skiing or water lawns that aren’t beneficial to local ecosystems. “And since then, the trend has been a decrease in the snowpack.” “From the mid ’30s to the mid ’70s, the snowpack was actually increasing,” Fassnacht said. From the flow of the Colorado River to ground water resources, snow is integral to water access, and Colorado is simply not getting the amount it used to. The Colorado River Compact of 1922 has been a focus, as the rights established in the compact are being renegotiated to protect the river.Ī lot of this water access is dependent on snowpack.

“The lower basin and the southern half of the upper basin had been in drought for 22 years,” said Steven Fassnacht, a snow hydrologist and professor at CSU. It’s a critical resource for the Southwest United States and Mexico. One of these rivers is the Colorado River, the sixth-longest river in the country, which serves nearly 40 million people. “As a headwater state, we’re a really critical location in terms of the different rivers that originate in Colorado,” said Melinda Laituri, professor emeritus in ecosystem science and sustainability at Colorado State University. And combating the issue of water scarcity in the region has been a priority for the states that rely on Colorado’s water resources. Colorado has been experiencing drought conditions on and off for decades.

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